Abstract: Earnings conference calls represent an important communication channel for investors to observe managerial behavior. We examine the impact of executive temperament using weather conditions at executive locations during these calls. Using a large sample of earnings conference calls from 2006 to 2017, we find that managers speak more negatively and with less (more) quantitative information (uncertainty) when locally-adjusted weather conditions are poor. We further identify that this negative relation is less pronounced for CFOs than CEOs. CEOs having prior financial experience are less affected and produce more quantitative information in poor weather conditions. Our results remain significant after adding controls for investor mood, separating firms from big and small states, mediation tests, firm fixed effects, executive fixed effects, and propensity score matching. Incremental to textual measurements, our findings suggest that exogenous effects of bad weather significantly impact manager temperament that the market views negatively.
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